I recently had a conversation with a client who was very excited to show me how his PPC ad was #1 in Google.

I asked him, “How much business is this ad generating?” He told me that he had no idea.

This is not a blog post about tracking your ad spending.

It’s to show something even more interesting…

The State of Advertising Today

Below is a study from Inc.com on the average cost of PPC ads from 2006 through 2012.

The average cost has almost tripled in the 6 year period.

When it comes to advertising, the conventional thinking is that it’s a numbers game. Spend a certain amount of money on advertising, get a return when a certain percentage of customers buy your product.

But what happens when advertising becomes prohibitively expensive? So much that you eventually are no long making a profit on the product your selling?

I’ll give another example.

About a year ago, Facebook, which had been a great tool for companies to connect with their customers with content, began restricting the organic access and reach company pages had to their fans. This means that even though someone has “liked” the page and wanted to be a fan, Facebook dropped the amount of reach your posts would have. They suggested buying ads instead.

Across the board, advertising costs are rising and competition is getting fiercer.

Don’t Be a Digital Sharecropper

A long time ago, poor farmers were given the “privilege” of growing crops on a lord’s land. The lord allowed numerous poor farmers to use his land to grow crops.

Everyone was happy. The farmers were able to grow crops and the lords received a nice rent income from the farmers.

The following year the lord told the farmers that he was raising the price of rent.

“A lot of people want to use this same land are willing to pay me more,” he told them. “Either pay the higher fee or find another place to grow your crops.”

With little choice, the farmers paid the higher rate, knowing full well this was the only way he could survive. He owned no land and had no chance of ever owning land.

This would continue year after year with the lord raising rent prices and the farmers glumly paying. Many couldn’t afford it and reduced the size of the field they rented. Others were wiped out and could no longer afford the rent and had to  find other ways to survive.

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The term “digital sharecropping” was something I first heard from Copyblogger.

In the digital marketing world, sites like Google, Facebook, Twitter etc are all the landlords and we the business owners are the farmers.

We “rent” space on their sites in the hopes of getting some land (traffic) to our sites so that we can benefit.

But who’s the real winner in this case?

The “landlord”, Google and Facebook.

The only way to break out of this cycle is to use their “land” to buy your own “land.”

In the sharecropping story, the only way to break out of the cycle, was for the farmers to diligently save so they could buy their own land and be free of the rent cycle from the landlord.

You too, need to break out of the digital sharecropping cycle by using traffic from Google, Facebook and other sites, to begin generating your own traffic.

How do you do this? With email.

Your “land,” the traffic you own is your email list – one of the most valuable assets any business can have. And I’m not talking about a list that you bought from someone else, I’m talking about building a list of people who are passionate (or at least interested) in what you have to offer.

Email is extremely easy to use and is very cheap to run. Use your list to gain their trust, and you’ll reduce your advertising costs.

And better yet, this is something you will own. No one can take it away from you. Not the latest Google algorithm or Facebook’s new policies.

It’s time to take the power away from the big people and build our businesses smartly.

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If you’re interested in seeing how I can help you carve and own your customers of your market check out these marketing automation options.